Stacy Branham

University of California, Irvine | UCI · Department of Informatics

This year the ASSETS conference is hosting a workshop on AI Fairness for People with Disabilities the day before the main conference program begins. This workshop will bring together forty participants to discuss the practical, ethical, and legal ramifications of emerging AI-powered technologies for people with disabilities. We organized this works...

Voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs) are becoming smaller, cheaper, and more accurate, such that they are now prevalent in homes (e.g., Amazon Echo, Sonos One) and on mobile devices (e.g., Google Assistant, Apple Siri) around the world. VAPAs offer considerable potential to individuals who are blind, offering efficiencies over gesture-based...

In society today, people experiencing disability can face discrimination. As artificial intelligence solutions take on increasingly important roles in decision-making and interaction, they have the potential to impact fair treatment of people with disabilities in society both positively and negatively. We describe some of the opportunities and risk...

Voice-Activated Personal Assistants (VAPAs)-like Apple Siri and Amazon Alexa - have rapidly become common features on mobile devices and in homes of millions of people around the world. They have proven to be particularly valuable to people with disabilities, chiefly among people with visual impairments. Yet, we still know relatively little about t...

Co-reading (when parents read aloud with their children) is an important literacy development activity for children. HCI has begun to explore how technology might support children in co-reading, but little empirical work examines how parents currently co-read, and no work examines how people with visual impairments (PWVI) co-read. PWVIs' perspectiv...

Transgender individuals in the United States face significant threats to interpersonal safety; however, there has as yet been relatively little research in the HCI and CSCW communities to document transgender individuals' experiences of technology-mediated safety and harm. In this study, we interviewed 12 transgender and non-binary individuals to u...

Voice-activated personal assistants (VAPAs)--like Amazon Echo or Apple Siri--offer considerable promise to individuals who are blind due to widespread adoption of these non-visual interaction platforms. However, studies have yet to focus on the ways in which these technologies are used by individuals who are blind, along with whether barriers are e...

In this paper, we describe interdependence for assistive technology design, a frame developed to complement the traditional focus on independence in the Assistive Technology field. Interdependence emphasizes collaborative access and people with disabilities' important and often understated contribution in these efforts. We lay the foundation of thi...

Designs are ultimately imbued with the values and judgments of the designers who made them. This means that there is an inherent power imbalance between designers and users. Some design philosophies embrace the position of designer as empowered architect (libertarian paternalism), while others try to shift power to users by integrating them into th...

Automatic Gender Recognition (AGR) refers to various computational methods that aim to identify an individual's gender by extracting and analyzing features from images, video, and/or audio. Applications of AGR are increasingly being explored in domains such as security, marketing, and social robotics. However, little is known about stakeholders' pe...

Technology has become central to many activities of learning, ranging from its use in classroom education to work training, mastering a new hobby, or acquiring new skills of living. While digitally-enhanced learning tools can provide valuable access to information and personalised support, people with specific accessibility needs, such as low or no...

For decades, researchers have investigated and developed technologies that support independent navigation for people who are blind. This has led to systems that primarily aid in detecting routes, landmarks, and building features. However, there has been relatively little inquiry regarding how technologies might support navigation around and in the...

Independent navigation is important to individuals who are blind and visually impaired (VI). Researchers have long explored how blind and VI people navigate to inform the design of more useful, accessible wayfinding devices. However, there has been little research on the role language plays in providing effective Text-to-Speech directions for this...

This workshop builds on the success of prior workshops that brought together HCI researchers to share stories about ethical challenges faced when conducting research in sensitive settings. There is growing recognition that reflective and empathetic approaches are needed to conduct ethical research in settings involving people who might be considere...

Prevention of errors has been an orienting goal within the field of Human-Computer Interaction since its inception, with particular focus on minimizing human errors through appropriate technology design. However, there has been relatively little exploration into how designers can best support users of technologies that will inevitably make errors....

This special issue on ethical matter(s) contains innovative and reflective scholarship focused on questions of ethics with human computer interaction (HCI) design research. Through this introductory piece, we articulate three trends influencing contemporary design research which are creating spaces of discomfort for many scholars as they acknowledg...

Large indoor spaces continue to pose challenges to independent navigation for people who are blind. Unfortunately, assistive technologies designed to support indoor navigation frequently make errors that are technically difficult or impossible to eliminate. We conducted a study to explore whether there are strategic ways designers can minimize the...

The ability for one to navigate independently can be essential to maintaining employment, taking care of oneself, and leading a fulfilling life. However, for people who are blind, navigation-related tasks in public spaces--such as locating an empty seat--can be difficult without appropriate tools, training, or social context. We present a study of...

In the HCI community, there is growing recognition that a reflective and empathetic approach is needed to conduct ethical research in sensitive settings with people who might be considered vulnerable or marginalized. At our CHI 2015 workshop on ethical encounters, researchers shared personal stories of the challenges and tensions they have faced wh...

While sighted users may learn to perform touchscreen gestures through observation (e.g., of other users or video tutorials), such mechanisms are inaccessible for users with visual impairments. As a result, learning to perform gestures without visual feedback can be challenging. We propose and evaluate two techniques to teach touchscreen gestures to...

Over the past century, people who are blind and their allies have developed successful public policies and technologies in support of creating more accessible workplaces. However, simply creating accessible technologies does not guarantee that these will be available or adopted. Because much work occurs within shared workspaces, decisions about ass...

An increasing number of online communities support the open-source sharing of designs that can be built using rapid prototyping to construct physical objects. In this paper, we examine the designs and motivations for assistive technology found on Thingiverse.com, the largest of these communities at the time of this writing. We present results from...

In recent decades, great technological strides have been made toward enabling people who are blind to live independent, successful lives. However, there has been relatively little progress towards understanding the social, collaborative needs of this population, particularly in the domestic setting. We conducted semi-structured interviews in the ho...

With HCI researchers conducting studies in increasingly sensitive and difficult settings, ethics is emerging as a key concern for the HCI community. New technologies are now being designed and evaluated in settings that involve vulnerable or marginalized participants and that can be emotionally challenging for researchers. Research in these setting...

The evolving philosophies, methods, and products of CSCW design research are more collaborative and value-active than ever. Researchers and participants may co-construct designs, thus sharing power; they may share intimate life stories over design probes, thus pushing socio-cultural boundaries; they may seek personal fulfillment through the product...

Video tends to be imbalanced as a medium. Typically, content creators invest enormous effort creating work that is then watched passively. However, learning tasks require that users not only consume video but also engage, interact with, and repurpose content. Furthermore, to promote learning across domains where content creators are not necessarily...

Though the design of technologies for couples has been thriving for well over a decade now, the products made for and the needs of couples examined in HCI research are surprisingly narrow. Overwhelmingly they are for partners at a distance and lightweight interactions that can best be described as abstracted presence. Towards moving couples technol...

Although designers seek to create designs that are novel, most are based in some part on previous work. However, formal methods for design rationale reuse are dismissed as too inhibiting to the creative process. In this chapter we argue for the reuse of rationale as a central activity in design, and explore how this can be used as part of the creat...

The design space for intimate partners has largely been populated with technologies that support distant partners via abstracted presence. We seek to expand the design space to include a wider range of potential users and designs. To this end, we present findings from qualitative interviews with Family Studies experts in the form of a stage-based m...

Technologies increasingly inhabit evermore mundane and personal settings, a fact that has caused some designers to reflect upon the emergent, inaccessible nature of context. We present the notion of processlessness as a design value. The examples given here are intended to provoke thought about current design priorities and practices, and spur de-...

Collaborative storyboarding, with a focus on aggregating designers' expertise in the storyboarding process, offers the opportunity for a group of designers to make progress toward creating a visual narrative for a new interface or technology, but it requires the designers to work together to explore ideas, differentiate between options, and constru...

Although designers often try to create novel designs, many designs are based on previous work. In this paper we argue for the reuse of rationale, in the form of claims, as a central activity in design, and explore how this can be used to inspire creativity. We present a design activity in which images and claims are reused to create a storyboard an...

NudgeCam is a mobile application that can help users capture more relevant, higher quality media. To guide users to capture media more relevant to a particular project, third-party template creators can show users media that demonstrates relevant content and can tell users what content should be present in each captured media using tags and other m...

Artifacts can be used to inspire, guide, and create new designs. As approaches to design can range from focusing on inspiration to formalized reasoning, we seek to create and study artifacts that combine the use of images and rationale. In this paper, we contribute an understanding of the relationship between imagery and rationale through an invest...

The use of whiteboards is pervasive across a wide range of work domains. But some of the qualities that make them successful—an intuitive interface, physical working space, and easy erasure—inherently make them poor tools for archival and reuse. If whiteboard content could be made available in times and spaces beyond those supported by the whiteboa...

Storyboarding offers designers the opportunity to illustrate a visual narrative of use. Because designers often refer to past ideas, we argue that storyboards can be constructed by reusing shared ar tifacts. We present a study in which we explore how designers reuse artifacts c onsisting of images and rationale during storyboard construction. We fi...

Storyboards and claims are two distinct artifacts used for system design in HCI. In this paper, we propose that these artifacts provide greater design value if they are used in combination. We first investigate the relative strengths and weaknesses of storyboards and claims in supporting design. Then, we present an exploratory study conducted to as...

Collaborative storyboarding, an emerging area of research, entails having groups of users work together to produce a sequence of user-system interactions. We conducted a study in which groups of designers were asked to construct storyboards using predetermined components. Initial analysis of the study sessions shows the emergence of a model for col...

We propose that the intimate couple is a significant cultural construct that, like "the user" or collaborative groups, ought to be studied and designed for in HCI. Towards making out the character of couplehood, we consulted with couple therapists and developed a guiding design framework. The resulting design is a mobile media space––A Diary Built...